1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data recovery, and more particularly to a protocol for communicating data block copies in an error recovery environment.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventionally, recovery management has been overseen by various systems that keep track of data being written to a storage medium. Recovery management may be necessary to recover data that has been altered by a disk crash, a virus, erroneous deletions, overwrites, and so on. Numerous other reasons are cited by companies and individuals for requiring access to data as it existed at one point in time.
Prior to recovery, data must be safeguarded by one or more back-up methods. Back-up methods may include copying files or databases so that they will be preserved in case of equipment failure or other catastrophe. Some processes may involve copying back-up files from a back-up media to a hard disk in order to return data to its original condition. Other techniques may include periodically copying the contents of all or a designated portion of data from the data's usual storage device to another storage medium so the data will not be lost in the event of a hard disk crash.
Back-up procedures, such as those described above, require a great deal of processing power from a server performing the back-ups of the data. For this reason, back-up procedures may be offloaded from a server so that the time ordinarily devoted to back-up functions can be used to carry out other server tasks.
For example, in some environments, an intelligent agent functions on a client device rather than the server in order to offload the back-up procedures. The intelligent agent may take a “snapshot” of a computer's data at a specific time so that if future changes cause a problem, the system and data may be restored to the way they were at the time of the “snapshot.”
Once copies of the data have been made in some manner, recovery management may be employed to recover the copies of the data. A data recovery system is designed to return the data to a state where it existed before certain changes were made to the data. The data may be recovered to different points in time, depending upon the state of the data a user wants to access.
Data recovery methods often require a user to know to what point in time the data is to be recovered. A tape, disk, or other back up medium can then be searched in order to recover the data as it existed at that particular point in time. Unfortunately, the user may not comprehend the best point in time to which to recover the data.